Always Song in the Water by Gregory O'Brien

Author:Gregory O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2019-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

LANDFALL AND DEPARTURE

How do you get off an island? This is a matter I am still trying to resolve satisfactorily. Although I was photographed disembarking from Raoul Island in May 2011, I find I am still trying to leave that island. It stays with me – not only the dramatic arrival and time spent on dry land, but also the bumpy transition from the solid rock-face back outwards, via an inflatable dinghy, onto the pulsing ocean.

Down the same steep headland where we arrived two days earlier, the nine artists went, one by one. Each leapt into the dinghy at the very moment its prow crashed into the rock. Then the outboard kicked into reverse and out we went, backwards along the crest of the breaking wave. We found ourselves once again suspended between air, sea and dry land – an experience which begged a question that has remained at the core of the Kermadec project to this day, and which has reverberated through just about all the words written and art made in the wake of that experience: Where do we, as human beings, belong in this larger ocean/island equation?

It only took a few hours on Raoul to realise that the island grants anyone who makes it there an exaggerated sense of everything, from the pleasures of tea drinking to their own mortality. You feel certain unprecedented proximities. And while the surrounding ocean is manifestly a hazardous zone, dry land isn’t necessarily any safer or more comfortable. Steam is constantly coming up through the ground – a reminder of the island’s volcanism. A couple of weeks after our stopover, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake shook the island and a 2.5-metre tsunami demolished the boatshed in which I was sitting less than a minute before the photographs overleaf were taken. A ‘local’ event, it hardly made the news back on mainland New Zealand.

‘I chant the world on my Western sea, I chant copious the islands beyond, thick as stars in the sky …’

WALT WHITMAN,

FROM ‘A BROADWAY PAGEANT’

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